Black as Night and Sweet as Sin
by TeaAndWarmSocks
Summary: He decided right then and there that he would go after her, the protagonist of his own story, a contrived, comic-book hero because that sounded better than an expendable, comic-book asshole.


"Her love was like cigarette smoke stirred into coffee." — Jarod Kintz

* * *

 **Black as Night and Sweet as Sin**

Ed didn't know whether she was the woman he was supposed to meet or whether she was an unassuming noncombatant, but he continued to stand there on that cobbled street anyway, casually-dressed and awkwardly stationed as if he were a street lamp instead of a person. It wasn't his fault, he couldn't help it, not when he was supposed to appear as nonchalant as she currently was, balanced precariously on a ladder near a theatre facade, a portion of her hair crammed beneath one of those caps he saw Manhattan paperboys parade around in. She didn't look very impressive, nor did she seem very credible either. Mustang had told him to treat her properly however, but he didn't even know what that was supposed to mean; she didn't look proper, not in the regal, red-lipped way he had known many women to favour, and he wasn't sure how to confront her about that.

He shrugged his shoulders aimlessly instead, wondering why he had even bothered to consider Mustang's perverse lecherousness as a form of courtesy, ambling across the street in a sort of sluggish stupor, watching the boyish woman sway to the side, a bag of tools thudding against her thigh.

"Êtes-vous Pinako?" he called out, stopping at the foot of the ladder.

She looked down from her spot atop the ladder and Ed nearly choked in surprise considering that he hadn't been expecting much; her mouth, blackened and discoloured where the contour of her lip softened at one corner was currently stretched in an awkward frown, almost as if she had become distraught upon noticing him there, standing strangely on the cobblestone as if he were nothing more than another oblivious tourist. Ed would have called her endearing if it weren't for the wrench in her hand or the smear of grease on her mouth, but he had learned the hard way that appearances could be deceiving.

She hastily whispered something that he couldn't understand and Ed, in an attempt to regain his cadence, muttered the word 'quoi' in return, seeing as he hardly understood a word of French and had been forced to journey to Paris under Mustang's authority.

"You're an idiot," she criticized in English, pointing her wrench at him accusingly from the top of the ladder, "I knew you were a foreigner the moment I saw you."

"I'm not a linguist, lady."

"And I'm not one of those sorority women you're so obviously used to."

"Then who—"

"I am Warrane and you're Edward, right? I was told you'd take me out for brunch, one of those cheap places where you can buy a croissant and a coffee for the same price." she said, making her way down the ladder.

"I never said I'd take you anywhere. This isn't a date."

Warrane ignored his heated statement, slinging her tool belt across the ladder's lower step, "I like my coffee with one dollop of honey and enough cream to turn it brown, not that muddy brown either—you got that, Ed?"

He was too busy staring at her incredulously to even consider the fact that she had just flippantly announced her caffeine preference as if he had been nothing but a server. Mustang had told him through a series of telegraphs that 'Pinako' was an illustrious reconnaissance specialist who had served her purpose as a combatant adequately, but she seemed strange now, a demanding excuse of a woman under the guise of some scroungy, tasteless mechanic. Ed didn't know whether she was normally as stubborn as an ox or not, but he had never been able deal with the wiles of women and hated the fact that she had already begun to act in accordance to some preverbal arrangement that he hadn't even agreed to. Ed wasn't in the mood to relinquish his pride to a woman who seemed too haughty to even care. He hadn't journeyed to France to take Warrane out for a picnic but hadn't decided to flounder around either; he was at a crossroads and had to confront that unconventional deterrent head on.

"I like my coffee black, preferably from one of those shitty diners back at home, but that seems far out of reach, don't you think?" he muttered, grimacing when she moved her wrench dangerously close to his head.

" _La Chat Noir_ is a block away. I'll buy you an entire jug of coffee if you keep your mouth shut."

"And if I don't?"

"You'll owe me another coffee _and_ a freshly baked croissant. Maybe even a slice of apple pie if you forget to speak French, Monsieur Edward."

Instead of lashing out like a perturbed tourist, Ed managed to adhere to her conduct, reluctantly marching down Rue de la Huchette, Warrane playing the part of a domesticated homemaker instead of a demanding provocateur. There was something odd about the way his face had begun to burn as they strolled eastward below the River Seine, heat blooming beneath the jacket he had slung across his shoulders. He wan't fond of the way she had so blatantly grabbed his hand or how she had managed to paste one of those phoney, tabloid smiles onto her mouth. Her behaviour was amateurish at best and he was confused as to why she seemed so nervous, so urgent, so completely _fabricated_ that he nearly yelled at her to _stop_.

She turned to look at him as they stopped in front of a dingy-looking café, a hole-in-the-wall that was crowded with men and women who looked like they had seen better days. It had become a testament to post-war Paris, an establishment that had served Pain au Chocolat, Madeleines, and Canelés four years prior, pastries that would have looked routine alongside the jug of coffee Warrane was currently bartering for. Ed had taken a seat by then, wondering how he had managed to come across such an odd, insistent woman and an even stranger café. He was fairly certain that it had been Mustang's fault considering that he had been reluctant to leave his crammed apartment, a modest space above one of those street-corner bakeries Al had once been fond of, but he didn't really miss it, not that much. Mustang had insisted that the Resistance was beginning to collapse in France, but he found himself strangely unconvinced and perturbed; he had yet to confront any sort of obstacle that would confirm Mustang's suspicions.

"Here's your diner coffee," Warrane stated from his peripheral, balancing a jug of coffee and a questionable gravy boat, "they wouldn't let me have any cream, so I've got us some milk instead."

Ed's nose scrunched up distastefully and he stared at the gravy boat in contempt, "Who'd want to drink liquid secreted from a cow?"

"I do obviously. It's either that or I drink the sewage I've so kindly retrieved for you." she said, reaching for Ed's abandoned mug.

He noticed absentmindedly that the logo emblazoned on the porcelain cup was unconventional, an ambiguous company that had christened themselves after a woman named _Winry,_ one of those blatant attempts to appeal to the masses in a way that would disperse the dissatisfaction ingrained on the cobbles through some kind of ingenious mass-marketing technique. It was as fabricated as Warrane's homemaker attitude and he hated it for a moment, hated the way the world had frozen in a perpetual state of pacification. He watched as Warrane slammed the mug down on the table and scowled, wondering how everything had gone so entirely wrong.

"You need to sort out your priorities."

"I have."

"Good," he continued, the mug nestled between his hands, "I don't want to be here longer than I have to."

"Tu es completement débile."

"And you're a demanding cheat."

"I know who you are and what you've done," she hissed, reaching for the gravy boat, "Pinako saw something in you that obviously doesn't exist."

"So you're not Pinako then? Jeez, lady, you've wasted—"

"The woman you call 'Pinako' was my grandmother. She died during the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne."

It was strange to hear such a story from Warrane's mouth considering that Ed had been privy to that questionable rumour in exclusive social circles. Members of the Resistance claimed that a paramilitary force belonging to the Vichy Regime had been under the impression that a Waffen-SS officer was being held captive in the nearby town of Oradour-sur-Glane. As a result, the 2nd Panzer Division, also known as 'Das Reich', sealed off the village and massacred its inhabitants in a matter of hours. Ed hadn't been particularly optimistic about these kind of stories since Al's premature death, the extravagant tales told by grief-stricken relatives who wanted to watch you cry in the name of retribution. He stared at Warrane instead of course, tempted to say something condescending or even sardonic, but managed to hold his tongue, knowing that the look on her face indicated sincerity.

"Did you live in Oradour-sur-Glane?"

"Yes."

"Why weren't you there that day?"

"I was in Cieux. My grandmother urged me to greet an old customer there," she said, bringing her coffee to her mouth, "she told me your name before—"

"So I've basically come here for nothing then. Is that what you're telling me?"

"You're making a scene, Ed," she whispered, glancing around _La Chat Noir_ nervously, "at least speak something other than English, s'il vous plait."

"My French is shit," he hissed under his breath, slamming his mug down on the table, "my superior officer is going to haul my ass back home because of what? Your intuition?"

"I want to know what makes you so damn special. Pinako's _dead_ because of your stupid war—"

"How very naive of you, _"_ he growled, placing his hands harshly on the table, "she's dead because she decided to _do_ something. This war isn't going to end miraculously and I'm not going to sweep your country from Hitler's _whimsical_ occupation if that's what you thought."

Ed pushed away from the table and thought about what he'd say to Mustang when he returned—something about false leads and pretentious women—but Warrane, in her state of indignation, had been raised to hold her own and had already abandoned the beverage she had asked for an hour beforehand. It wasn't easy to admit that she was just as messed up as he had become over the years, charging down Rue de la Huchette with an objective so blatantly obvious that it made his head hurt, but he didn't want to run from a woman who would run him ragged in the end. Instead, he stopped walking, ignoring the shopkeeper screaming down the street and succumbed to her guile, her cunning, her _stubbornness_ as if it were a tangible thing, curling across the cobbles on a path of redemption because he knew, beyond a doubt, that she wasn't the kind of woman who liked to lose.

"It's impolite to walk away from a woman," she said, grabbing his collar, "and it's even worse to leave without paying Monsieur Beauchene for your street sludge."

"Leave me alone already," he said contemptuously, removing her hands from his jacket, "you've done enough by dragging me here to satisfy your curiosity."

"Get your head out of your ass! Pinako knew she was going to die _._ I knew she was dallying in some serious stuff, but I didn't know that she was a member of—"

"I wouldn't say those words if I were you."

"Fine. I won't."

"Good. Keep your mouth shut. Move on."

"But I—"

"Jeez, Winry, what do you want me to do? You shouldn't have involved yourself in something you don't understand."

He didn't notice that he had accidentally called her Winry but she didn't seem to care. Mustang would have called him apathetic, callous even, if he had seen what he had done, but Ed sincerely thought that Warrane was as fabricated as the logo emblazoned on the cup he had abandoned and couldn't be swayed to reconsider what he had accepted as the truth. He didn't know who she was or what she had done—she could be lying for heaven's sake—but he wasn't too concerned because she had become a challenge, a testament to those days where he could choose when he fought or how he fought without consequence. It wasn't hard to admit that she was unnatural in a sense—Al had continuously told him that he was too abrasive when it came to women, not that he cared—but he was confused as to why Warrane seemed extraordinarily blunt in comparison to the prim and proper women Mustang hauled around. She wasn't beautiful in that suave, debonair kind-of-way, but she wasn't ugly either. He could tell that she had been worn down over the years, her face a testament to the thick-skinned way she had been living, and he wondered, standing there on that street, whether she even cared for his brash, indecent ways.

"Do you want to know what she told me that day?" she warbled, her voice cracking, "sure, she said your name, but she told me something else. You're compromised, you jackass. I was supposed to tell you that."

He hadn't been expecting that and she seemed to know it too, her mouth curling into a grimace that he wasn't overly fond of. What was he supposed to do? It would have been better if he had stayed at home, lounging around his apartment in a dazed stupor, eating one of those stale, crappy baguettes from the bakery downstairs because he would have at least had a chance to consider what he'd done in Normandy a year earlier. But Ed wasn't lounging around his cramped apartment and he hadn't bought a particularly stale piece of bread; as Ed watched Monsieur Beauchene emerge from around the bend of a particularly jagged building, screaming because he hadn't been chivalrous enough to pay for his coffee, he knew that he had come across another unconventional deterrent and he wasn't too happy about it.

"Here's some cash," Warrane said cooly, dropping a couple of francs in his hand, "this is the least I can do for wasting your time."

"Wait, Winry—"

He took a deep breath, prepared to speak, prepared to protest, prepared to _apologize_ because he figured she'd want to hear those two meaningless words, an agreeable ' _I'm sorry',_ but she moved quickly for a mechanic, her mouth suppressing the sentence he hadn't been able to say. Now he _really_ hadn't been expecting that, the pleasant taste of her sweetness a testament to the fury percolating through her pores, so he played along, pretending to be her lover because they couldn't appear to be anything else in front of man who clearly thought that they were thieves.

She pulled away when Monsieur Beauchene's screams began to heighten. "Don't worry," she hissed with venom, "I don't kiss and tell. Your secret's safe with me, Edward Elric."

"You're a conniving gear-head, you know that?" he said, his brow furrowing from anger.

"And you're a sadist. A chauvinistic, conceited sadist that deserves to _rot_ for being so completely heartless."

Ed was abandoned upon the conclusion of that proclamation, casually-dressed and poised to take a beating because everything she had told him hadn't been a lie. He moaned the word 'pourquoi' under his breath, observing how she seemed to sway in the distance, a haughty, dangerous spectre reminiscent of cold-hearted contempt and he hated her for a moment, hated her the way he hated Mustang. It wasn't his fault that she had become a monster, one of those crazy, domineering beasts that walked the earth the way he knew she would—he hadn't expected much, he had told himself that from the very beginning—but he also hadn't been expecting her sincerity and that bothered him more than her behaviour and her personality combined. He decided right then and there that he would go after her, the protagonist of his own story, a contrived, comic-book hero because that sounded better than an expendable, comic-book asshole.

Ed shoved the francs in Monsieur Beauchene's hand and began to follow Winry down Rue de la Huchette, but not before he bought another coffee. He figured she'd want one.

* * *

 **A/N:** I don't speak French, so I apologize for any discrepancies (I did my research though, I promise) that are glaringly obvious.

Yes, _Black as Night and Sweet as Sin_ is set during WWII. The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane _did_ happen and it was a heinous ordeal. Look it up if you're curious.

I haven't decided whether I want to continue this story or not, but as of now, it's complete.

Thanks for reading! Leave me a review if your prone to do so. :)

\- TeaAndWarmSocks


End file.
